where were you? Where was our protection?”
She listened.
“It’s too late. You’re too late.”
There was silence again.
“That’s where we’re going now. We’ll be there in a few minutes. But it’s too late, isn’t it.”
Another silence.
“Ten minutes, then,” she said, and clipped the phone shut.
It was Wednesday. The dusty car park that was full on Saturday market day was empty but for two unmarked cars. Four men seemed to be on four phones, but she saw that only two of them had phones in their hands as she and Willy drew up in a billow of dust.
Willy was out of the car first, shouting at them in Hungarian, then French, berating them with every obscenity he could come up with. Now it was she who put her hand on his shoulder.
“We have to think, Willy,” she said, and he quietened under her hand as if he’d been given a dose of morphine.
On their way into the town, they’d looked in every car along the road, but there was nothing, nobody, who alerted any suspicions.
At one point as they sped from the flashes of light to shade, light to shade, under the spreading branches of the plane trees, Willy said: “It was the women at the bed and breakfast. The so-called Danish lesbians.”
“Yes,” she replied. “They sent women. Of course they sent women.”
And now they were standing in the dusty car park with four French intelligence officers and no plan.
The elder of the four men broke away.
“We’re putting up roadblocks on every road from the town, twenty miles out,” he said. “We’re checking any private air movements in the area this morning. Alerts are going out to air and sea ports. We’ll find your son.”
“Will you?” she said.
The officer didn’t reply to the question.
“There’ll be two men stationed at the house. You mustn’t stay there, but we need to have a presence. They’ll contact you via there.”
She could see he was keeping himself under control. He understood. He had children of his own, perhaps. He knew what was happening to her. For the first time, she felt like weeping. There was someone else in the world, someone she didn’t even know, who understood.
“One of us will come with you. In your car. The rest will go, one ahead, one behind, in these two cars. We’ll be joined by others. Helicopters are being scrambled at Nimes. We’ll take you to a safe place.”
A lot, a little too late, she thought. Anna’s mind flitted across the possibilities like the eyes of a gambler at a roulette table. But they were all losing numbers. The banker always won.
The Foreign Legion headquarters was at Nimes, she realised. There’d be men, equipment. But whoever had taken Little Finn would know the alert would be almost immediate. They would have a route out, roadblocks or no roadblocks. And nobody could begin to attempt a search of the summer traffic that sped bumper to bumper down the autoroute to the beaches.
Willy took her arm and pulled her aside.
“There’s one place we can go that you know.”
“I’d thought the same thing,” she said.
They turned back to the officer.
“We’ll have a house for you . . . ,” he began.
“We know where we’re going,” Willy said. “We’ll need all the backup you say you have. I have a place near Marseille. It’s completely private. Believe me. Between you and me, even the immigration authorities know nothing about it.”
The officer had his orders, but Anna and Willy were climbing into their car. He had no time to persuade them one way or the other, only to order his men into the two cars and follow.
“Head for the intersection of the autoroute, the first one south of Avignon,” Willy shouted.
He started the car, and Anna saw men running to the two other cars. One pulled out ahead of them, one tucked in behind. She heard the sound of one of the men fitting a magazine into what was unmistakably a bolt- action rifle.
They drove with unreasoning speed, as if they were going to meet someone, rather than running away. At the intersection south of Avignon, a French electricity truck with an engine several grades above its usual requirements joined them to one side on the three-lane motorway, and a black Audi took the inside lane. They were boxed in neatly by their protectors.
At the next intersection beyond the meeting place, three police cars pulled onto the road, ensuring that the massed traffic slowed, giving the watchers more eyes and more time to search the flow.
There were tourists on their way to the sea this side of Marseille, all of Marseille’s own commercial traffic, and yet another stream of commercial and tourist vehicles heading for Ventimiglia and the Italian border. There was no chance of finding anyone in this exodus.
“We’ll find him,” Willy said at one point. “We’ll find him, Anna.”
But Anna was already sitting on a hard chair in a bare interrogation room at the Forest east of Moscow, with Little Finn crying in a corner. It was her they wanted, and they would have her. All that remained to be decided now was how they would contact her, and when. The sooner the better, she thought.
From time to time, glancing in the mirrors, Willy would say, “Check the green Peugeot three cars behind our tail.” Or “Watch that truck on the outside. I don’t like it.”
“Just drive, please, Willy. You can’t do more than that.”
“All eyes now are important,” he’d say. “You cannot watch too much.”
She let him do what he wanted. She knew she couldn’t argue anymore. In her mind, they had won. They would put Little Finn in some filthy orphanage in Krasnoyarsk, or bring him up in an unkind KGB family for indoctrination.
All she had to defend him with was Mikhail. Would she sentence Mikhail to death to get her son back? Of course—of course she would.
The police cars dampened the lawless holiday elation of the tourists, and they crawled at a sedate pace within the speed limit like a presidential procession, three lanes wide.
She saw their exit looming ahead, three kilometres, two, there it was, the lane to the exit on the right and then up to the roundabout and onto the country roads.
Willy pulled into the exit lane and the electricity truck gave way and hung behind them. The Audi stayed out to the left and swung in at the last minute, to block anyone else with the same idea. The two cars of the intelligence team that had started out with them were in front and behind.
“Watch that truck. I tell you, watch that truck,” Willy urged.
She looked behind them and saw a truck that had been with them for an hour now. It was pulling onto the exit road.
The sky was darkening in readiness for the night. A huge swath of pinks and purples fired the horizon to the west behind them. Ahead, the smokestacks of Marseille’s industrial zone pumped white smoke up from half a dozen stacks, the smoke turning pink in the reflected night sky.
They reached the top of the exit lane. They had their protection car in front and one behind, but it and the black Audi had fallen back. The lights of the truck Willy had asked her to watch were right behind them.
It suddenly slowed as she watched in the mirror and Willy pulled up behind the car in front, at the roundabout. She saw the truck’s bed tip up to the sky, and it squealed to a halt, sliding slightly on the hot tarmac. It had stopped. She didn’t see what came out of the back of it, the thousands of watermelons that tipped and rolled down the slight incline of the exit road. But she saw that, now, nothing was following. There was only the car in front and the electricity truck that was with them. Their protection had been reduced to just these two.
Neither of them uttered a word. It was clear the game was in play. Was it a French game or a Russian game? She didn’t know. She noted that the helicopters that had accompanied them and were going about their own tasks in the search had turned for home with the onset of darkness.
Night had fallen.
She saw Willy’s tight face in the reflection of lights. She knew he was concerned only to save her. But either
